Link Building Strategies & Tips

#1 Buy/Build Links on Sites Relevant to Yours

Links on relevant sites are more powerful and should be the primary focus of your link building/buying efforts. While links on irrelevant sites will still help, they will not help as much. There is also the question of what exactly "relevant" means. Is it possible for two sites to be related without being in the same category? For example a site about cars may be relevant to a site about stereos even though they are different things. I like to think of relevancy in this way; Would the users on "Site A" be interested in the content on "Site B". A good example of this is the topics link building and web design. While the subjects are completely different, most link builders are interested in web design information and vice versa.

#2 Use Your Primary Keywords in the Anchor Text of Your Links

The anchor text, also known as link text, is the text used in the link pointing to your site. This text should be one of your primary keywords for the page that you are linking too. For example, if you are linking to your homepage which is optimized for the keyword "Mortgages", you will want to use that keyword in the links pointing to that page. The search engines look at the link text of your incoming links to help determine what your site is about. Optimizing the anchor text of your links can have a huge effect on your rankings.

Another important point is that you should not overuse any one keyword. It looks unnatural if all of your links have the same anchor text. Generally speaking, you only have to worry about overusing a keyword in your anchor text if you are buying hundreds or thousands of links. If you are just buying a few links then there is nothing to worry about.

An example of link text would be the word "Buy Links" in this link which points to Textlinkbrokers Buy Links

#3 Leave your links up long enough for them to help

It can take weeks for the search engines to see any new links that you purchase. It can also take months before those links improve your rankings. It takes the search engines a good amount of time to find and recalculate all the web pages and links on the internet. Ranking changes can happen daily but they are usually due to changes done a few months back. You should plan, and budget, to keep your links up for at least 90 days. Any time shorter then that would not be sufficient to accurately gauge ROI. With that being said tip #4 talks about tracking your keyword rankings, in order to watch improvements.

In addition, one of the newest additions to Google's link popularity algorithm is Link Age. In order to combat manipulation of its system by link builders, Age now plays a major role in determining the value of a link. So, keep your links up for as long as possible. This is one of the primary reasons we developed our Permanent Links Program. Our permanent links have been used by thousands of our customers with great results. See our Client Rankings List for examples of our client's successes.

#4 Track your Results Using a Keyword Rank Tracking Software

It is very important that you track the results of your link buying efforts. By tracking your keyword rankings you can see exactly how your links are helping. Most webmasters only track the traffic coming to their site. While this is helpful, it is important to know that you will not see any significant traffic from a keyword until you have reached the top 10.

Many webmasters spend significant resources on link building only to give up because they are not seeing significant traffic increases after a few months. If those same webmasters were tracking their keywords they would probably find that they have made significant progress toward reaching the top 10. It does not make sense to give up with the finish line in site. I cannot tell you how many customers we have served that had no clue that they had improved their rankings from the top 100's to the top 20's, only to give up because they had no clue that of the major improvements that had happened.

10 Free Super Simple Back-Link Building Tips

After reading a thread in a forum with some frankly crap link building advice I thought I’d give it my ten bob.

1. Don’t get a link from “links” pages on sites as these are about 1% as useful as your signature link on the 7th page of a forum thread, unless of course the Page is a PR 9 with a lot of back-links itself
2. If a site wants to link to you from a page with 100 links on it you can basically forget it as the strength of the link is shared by, well, 100 others!
3. So if you have a site about Dogs you might want to link out to Crufts or the Kennel Club or Wiki a good one.
4. You need to get into the good neighbourhoods. Try and get links from the neighbourhoods at the top of Google for your key phrases after all Google likes these sites enough to rank them! Find that circle of sites where all the big boys in your industry link to and are linked from and get involved. For instance, try and get a link from a .gov site!
5. See who links to your competitors and try and get a link as well (or pay money to have their link replaced with yours
6. Use Yahoo and type “link:yourcompetitors.com” and see who links to them. Yahoo is kind enough to rank pages virtually by the number of back-links sites have in site explorer - making it one of my most used seo tools.
7. Don’t waste your time with seo tools! Join Social Network tools like Delicious, Technorati and Stumble. There’s three links right there, although to be fair, they are not actually counted as linksby Google becasue of the Nofollow attribute. Digg links count, though.
8. A link is a link. If someone, anyone wants to link to you accept, just don’t always reciprocate with a link back to them (negates the value of the link, almost) and could see your site lose trust. Remember Google says it is impossible for a site to hurt your site by simply linking to your site, but you can hurt your site if you link to another site with a ’shady’ backlink profile.
9. It doesn’t hurt to get a link from a low or high Google Page Rank page. Today’s No-PR page might be a PR 5 page in reality, as Google Toolbar is out of date.
10. Good Google rankings is not all about who you get a link from it’s who you link to - this is thought to be the measure of the trust of a site and seems fairly reasonable to me. Link to authority sites in your industry as well as other sites that look like quality upcoming sites, and stay clear of suspect sites.

Obviously I assume you have a blog with original content on it! And remember it’s quality of links not quantity. What, you want a bonus one as is normal blog etiquette?

Sod it - I can’t be bothered.

Natural Link Building Top 20 Tips

With all this talk of link buying and how it can effectively cause your much valued website to drop out of the serps altogether, maybe it’s time to review your methods of acquiring links and for us to discuss the steps to take in find good websites to link to that add value to your own site.

Sifting through the many sites out there is without doubt a laborious process and requires time and dedication. A good link builder needs to take into account a multitude of considerations, mainly how the acquired link will affect the website not only now but in the future too.

Lets make a list of tips for link building. I’ll start the ball rolling, by the end of comments I will compile the top 20 tips so you too can become a professional link builder.

1) Check out backlinks to your competitors website, make a list of these links and by the time you have researched a number of sites you should start to see a pattern emerging.

2) When negotiating links, think very carefully as to the angle you will approach the webmaster with. OK, that link may benefit you, but what does he/she get in return ?

3) What methods will you employ to make sure the links remain on your chosen site ?

4) ( I always struggle with this one) Determine if the site is a good linking partner. What’s the nature of the site? What impact will it have on your site if you link to it ? Who owns the site ? ( Some people such as Dave get a gut feeling about a site, but here we need to establish a definite method for filtering out the crap)